By MARK SATOLA
ROCKY RIVER, Ohio — You’d be hard pressed to find a more adventurous evening of music than the concert by Factory Seconds Brass Trio Monday night at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.
On the program, an offering by the Rocky River Chamber Music Society: original and arranged works unknown to all but specialists in this sadly overlooked corner of the repertoire.
The group takes its name from the role the members play in their day jobs as second-chair musicians with the Cleveland Orchestra. Trumpeter Jack Sutte, hornist Jesse McCormick, and trombonist Richard Stout are also all on the faculty at Baldwin-Wallace University.
Factory Seconds has made it its mission to bring its very attractive rep into the mainstream, through a strategy of commissioning arrangements and new works and, imminently, creating recordings for general release. Currently in the works is a collaborative project with ThinkTank engineers at Case Western Reserve University exploring the interaction of brass instruments and electronically-generated sounds. Among the composers they have worked with are Baldwin-Wallace composer-in-residence Clint Needham, David Loeb, Robert Pound, Matthew Barbier and Esin Gunduz.
Monday night’s concert was a sort of “Audience’s Guide to Factory Seconds,” with arrangements of chansons by Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt, five three-part inventions by Bach (the only familiar music on the program), and four fugues from Hindemith’s unjustly neglected piano compendium “Ludus Tonalis.”
Original works included a marvelously peculiar piece by Canadian composer Norman Sherman (1924-2015), with the best title seen in quite some time, “The National Anthem of the Moon.” Factory Seconds also played original trios for brass by American Robert Marek and Czech composer Vaclav Nelhybel.
Most interesting was the world premiere of David Loeb’s “Madrgaletti,” literally “Little Madrigals,” which trafficked in a chromatically complex postmodern tonality and plenty of interplay among the instruments in its five tiny movements. Factory Seconds brought to it the same intelligence and liveliness that informed everything on the program, and the audience, to judge from their response, liked this challenging but rewarding music very much.
Michael Galloway made the arrangements of the five three-part Inventions by Bach, as well as the four fugues by Hindemith. The Hindemith pieces were especially attractive, given that Hindemith himself wrote so knowledgeably for brass instruments. Factory Seconds’ idiomatic playing of these pieces was technically perfect and interpretively intelligent, whetting the appetite for a hearing of an arrangement for piano and brass trio of Hindemith’s entire hour-long score.
The hallmark of Factory Seconds, in fact, is that welcome combination of technical perfection, alert and creative intelligence, and artistic adventurousness that is too often missing from ensembles that find it more expedient to play it safe in the overworked realms of the tried-and-true. Factory Seconds has chosen instead to blaze a courageous path through rich realms of undiscovered music, to which we can only say “Godspeed.”
Contact Mark Satola at marksatolaonmusic@gmail.com.
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